The Crashmeister

Rusty Haight pioneers being a better crash dummy.

February 2005 By DAVID C. HOLZMAN

0shares

News accounts drew two more witnesses out of the woodwork, whose testimony would bolster the case, most notably, Trevor Condren, the police crash examiner who had inspected the Simca following the murder and had said at the time that it could not have killed Anderson. He had been prevented from testifying at the original trial. Now, in court, Condren identified the Simca in a photo, noting that there had been no blood, fabric, or skin on it.

In court, Christian says, "Rusty was so good at his work that while he was giving this incredibly detailed scientific evidence he was chatting up the girl who was running the tapes for the court transcript."

Rusty played a major role in Button's exoneration. The Supreme Court summary credits the crash tests for raising doubts that Button's Simca hit Anderson, and for corroborating Cooke's account from Button's 1964 appeal.

After Button's lawyer read Eric Cooke's 1964 affidavit describing how he ran down Anderson, the video of Rusty driving the Holden into the dummy eerily echoed Cooke's account.

On the last day of the appeal, in his summary, the Crown prosecutor stuck to the original story that Rosemary Anderson had been carried for some distance on the front of the car. But the judges began quoting Rusty's evidence to the contrary. It then dawned on Button's supporters that they had won the case.

For arcane expertise, though, Rusty can't top Col. John Paul Stapp, MD. Although Rusty has taken a 27-mph change in velocity over 12/100ths of a second, "a low risk, relatively speaking," he says, Stapp stopped short from 632 mph over 1.4 seconds, riding the rocket-powered Sonic Wind on sled tracks in 1953 experiments he conducted to test whether humans might survive ejection from supersonic aircraft. He burst nearly every capillary in his eyes, although his sight was nearly normal a day later. "He's the man," says Rusty.

But how many people need to eject from a supersonic aircraft?

Rusty's original ambition was about helping people. The Button case was probably his greatest fulfillment, but when you draw him out on car safety, it's clear he takes great satisfaction in chipping away at a major public-health problem.